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Smart Zambia and Benefits of e-PAYSLIPS

What is Smart Zambia?

Smart Zambia is an initiative established under Government Gazette No.836 of 2016 as an e-Government division in the office of the President. The initiative is aimed at transforming the country through information and communication technologies and deployment of electronic Government services and processes for effective public service delivery.

What is the Mandate of Smart Zambia?

The Smart Zambia Initiative has a mandate of co-ordinating and harmonizing the implementation of electronic Government services and processes in order to improve service delivery across all Government Ministries and Spending Agencies.

What are the functions of the Smart Zambia

In order to achieve its mandate Smart Zambia has the following specific functions;

Promotion and management of e-Government policies and programmes.

Development of strategies and standards that enhance usage and application of information and communication technology innovations in the public sector.

Development of supportive and enabling shared infrastructure to ensure equitable access to effective and appropriate information and communication technologies among others.

Implementation of the e-payslips

In its efforts to actualize electronic governance, Smart Zambia has introduced electronic payslips for all civil servants. In the first phase of the e-payslip capturing exercise 109,000 civil servants were captured on the e-payslip platform and these are able to receive their payslips through emails out of 169,000. The 60,000 remaining are mostly in rural areas and are scheduled to be captured in the second phase once the districts are connected to the system. The implementation of the e-payslip system has a number of benefits to the Government.

In the first instance, through the e-payslip system, Government has been able to save K72 million on payslip printing and K68 million on the cost of paper annualy (Smart Zambia). Secondly, the e-payslip system has helped Government curb fraud and to get rid of ghost civil servants. This has helped the Government to save up money from salaries from those who were either dead or out of employment.

And lastly, the e- payslip system is complementing Government in achieving its green environment initiatives, this is because the phasing out of paper payslips entails reduction in cutting down of trees and low energy usage.

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